Glowing Fish -- transgenic fish Calif.

Zebra researchers,

In California, it looks like a coalition of crass commercial interests
(commercial fishermen who don't like the competition from people
raising fish instead of wild harvest), anti-GMO activists (where the very
idea of moving genes between species is an evil activity), misled
environmental activists (worrying about genes from zebra fish jumping
into native species) and state Senator Sher's office (modern day
Luddites wanting to stop biotechnology) have succeeded in setting up
rules that will effectively eliminate these fish from California.

Even for scientific researchers, they have to fill out permit forms, have
inspections and pay hundreds of dollars in fees to have legal fish with
any trasgenic modification. Furthermore, the definition of transgenic
includes endogenous constructs "to produce, gene additions, deletion,
and doubling, or changing the position of the gene".

For commercial zebra producers, such as ourselves, we also are
required to have a public hearing before the Fish and Game
commission to add transgenic fish to our aquaculture registration (at
added cost and fee's). For researchers who need 100's of thousands
of embryos or tens of thousands of specific transgenic lines per week,
we will do "contract growing", where we mass produce a customers
line of transgenic zebra fish. We are going through all the procedures
to obtain all the permits in the hope that some researchers will find a
use for large numbers of transgenic fish.

Researchers in California must have their permit forms in by Aug 14,
2003 if they want to legally hold, import, export, breed or transport any
mutants meeting the strange legal definition of transgenic, which
includes "deleted" genes.

Dallas

Dallas E. Weaver, Ph.D. Scientific Hatcheries
[Only registered users see links. ] 5542 Engineer Dr.
714-890-0138 Huntington Beach, CA Fax
714-890-3778 92649
[Only registered users see links. ]






in article bgoftu$r2h$[Only registered users see links. ].mrc.ac.uk, dan at
[Only registered users see links. ] wrote on 8/5/03 7:45 AM: